That was the unmistakably Northern-voiced soundbite Barrie Rutter gave the London critic who travelled to Yorkshire in June 1992 to preview the inaugural production of his new company, Northern Broadsides, named, pointedly, to deliver what it promised in performance: 'verbal attack'. Voices like Rutter's have never been cast as Shakespeare's royals, at least not at the Royal Shakespeare and National Theatres; hence his audacious (some said barmy) decision to declare theatrical UDI, to set up a company where he and his working-class Northern accent would be entitled to play the hunchback king. As things turned out, however, when it came to the performance, Rutter's Richard sounded different even before he opened his mouth. It was his footfall that produced the play's original bizarre acoustic, an uneven, slurred silence broken by a percussive clomp as he limped the full length of his impromptu stage, a concrete-floored boatshed on Hull marina. On his good foot Rutter was wearing a shoe; on the gammy twisted one, the sort of wooden clog every spinner or weaver in the north of England wore in the mills a couple generations back and fishworkers on Hull docks, Rutter's father among them, still did in the 1960s - the sort of clog that functioned not just as industrial footwear but class apparatus and cultural marker.